Tag: michael-cahill

When it comes to vintage crime noir movies, nothing is more iconic than the threat of giving someone a pair of cement shoes.

That is, encasing a person’s feet in concrete and dropping them into a body of water. While Hollywood co-opted this extreme form of mafia justice on the silver screen, it’s unclear exactly how widespread the practice has been throughout history.

But a recent story out of Brooklyn, New York, shows that when it comes to methods of disposal, the mafia says, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Earlier this week, police discovered the body of a 28-year-old career criminal wrapped in black plastic bags on Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn. The man had his arms tied behind his back and his body was weighed down with cement shoes.

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New York City Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce told the press that the victim had his feet “submerged in poured concrete,” and that it was “obviously a homicide.”

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However, those pouring the concrete allowed a little too much air to get in during the process, which caused the body to float to the surface and wash up on the shore.

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Traditionally, cement shoes are made by putting a victim’s feet through the holes of a cinder block and then filling those holes with concrete, but buckets are also used. It’s unclear how exactly this victim’s “shoes” were constructed.

At the time of this writing, police have identified the man who was killed but are withholding his name until family members can be notified. Let this be a lesson to never cross someone who can legitimately threaten you with the possibility of using cement shoes.

Gordon Ramsay has earned himself a reputation as a celebrity chef and with an adventurous palate. While this makes for great entertainment for us viewers, it doesn’t always look so pleasant for Ramsay. Take this clip from the 2011 season of his show, “Gordon’s Great Escape.” In it, the chef pays a visit to Vietnam and is served a rare delicacy: the beating heart of a snake…

Here’s our mild NSFW warning if you don’t have a strong stomach…

Well, I’ll be honest…that looks like a very stressful eating situation.

Initially, DeFeo claimed that the murders were the work of a hitman, but he soon confessed and was sentenced to life in prison. He’s still behind bars today.

Not long after, the new owners of the home claimed to be haunted by several angry spirits. Their tales of paranormal activity became the basis for Jay Anson’s popular book “The Amityville Horror,”and for all subsequent films.

Regardless of whether the house is haunted or not, the new owners could make a killing if they opened up an Amityville horror-themed bed and breakfast. (Okay, maybe “make a killing” isn’t the best phrase.)

If you’re a fan of genuinely creepy horror films, then you’ve probably heard about the upcoming movie from director Robert Eggers called The Witch.

So far, the reviews for the film have been stellar, and audiences are delighted by the genuinely unnerving horror of The Witch. When the credits roll and the lights go up, most people believe that everything they saw was simply a work of fiction and they have nothing to worry about, right?

Well, not so fast…

This week, Eggers sat down to talk about his new film and exactly how he researched it.

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As it turns out, the film was inspired by history, not fiction.

“In the early modern period, the real world and the fairy tale world — for everyone but the extreme intelligentsia — were the same thing. People really believed that the old lady down the lane that they were calling a ‘witch’ was actually a fairy-tale ogress, capable of doing the most horrible things,” he told the blog io9.

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“It was very easy to dig into that and be obsessed with trying to bring the audience back to the 17th century and show them a Puritan’s nightmare. I wanted to bring them back to the time when a witch was a really powerful thing, and not a cheesy plastic Halloween costume,” said Eggers.

Eggers said he also dug into writings from the time to find dialogue for the movie.

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“As I was reading, I would find sentences and phrases that worked and I would write them down constantly. Then I would organize them into different situations where they might be used,” said Eggers. “Earlier drafts of the script were these monstrous, cannibalized versions of other people’s stuff in a weird collage, which then got shaped into something that was more mine. However, there are some things that are absolutely intact. A lot of the things the children say when they’re possessed are supposedly things that children actually said when they were possessed, and so on.”

Needless to say, all of this meticulous research has paid off in a big way. It’s looking like The Witch might just be the creepiest movie of 2016. Judge for yourself in the trailer below.